12 ms·
I think the spirit of this to allow for drastically modified yeast that produce, say, anti-cancer drug X to be patented. To make the biological equivalent of an
by aroch 11y ago
I think the spirit of this to allow for drastically modified yeast that produce, say, anti-cancer drug X to be patented. To make the biological equivalent of an industrial methods patent. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to protect your IP even though significant effort has gone into creating a chimeric yeast, because its just a collection of natural products (natural product's are currently not patentable).
Still, seems a little odd / slippery slope-y to me. On the one hand, I understand and, to some extent, agree with the need to protect / profit off what you've developed. On the otherhand, USPTO is pretty bad at biological patent screening and I can see a huge landrush to patent bacteria for no good reason.
(Full disclosure, I am in the process of patenting a modified natural product made by a bacteria)
- david-given 11y agoI've never understood why people patent organisms. That's not an ethical thing --- I understand why people want IP protection. It just seems like the wrong mechanism. Isn't the goal of restricting copying of your engineered organism better suited to the copyright system, rather than the patent system? Patents are for processes, right? But an organism is a thing, not a process. Isn't making an illegal copy of that thing a copyright violation?
- aroch 11y agoPatenting an organism that you've tweaked, tuned and bent to your will is, in the end, no different than patenting a unique alloying mix or manufacturing machine. They aren't patenting the organism per se, they're patenting the processes they've developed that make use of the organisms as the scaffold/factory. In the case I outlined previously of a yeast making a drug, you would want the patent on the cellular machinery that you've built to make the drug, which is the process.
- avar 11y agoNo, they're patenting the organism, or the end result. If you come up with an entirely different process to tweak the same organism by happenstance it's still covered by the patent. This is pretty much the definition of how patents differ from copyright law, if I word-for-word write come up with the same work as you and I can prove that I didn't copy yours, it's not covered by copyright law. With patents it doesn't matter that I came up with it on my own, you own the rights to the end result.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoExactly. It's why we tried to fight that crap back when they first tried it.
- aroch 11y agoI'm not so sure, how is the end result any different than patenting a better manufacturing technique? That happens all the time in the macro-world. Again, I'm not sure how I feel on whether it should be patentable or not. But, at least as I understand it, their intent is protection for something they've spent millions/billions developing -- no different than the process patents we have now.
- Dylan16807 11y agoThat's an argument against patents existing at all. It's not really relevant to a discussion of what counts as patentable, because such a discussion assumes that patents are a valid mechanism.
- btilly 11y agoPatents aim to trade a temporary bad result (monopoly) for a permanent good result (incentives to invent stuff). Discussing exactly how bad the temporary bad result is informs discussion of when that trade-off is worthwhile. And this is true whether or not your conclusion is that patents are never OK or only sometimes OK.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWhen discussing whether X should be patented, it is appropriate to discuss the trade-offs specific to X. It is a poor time to discuss trade-off generic to all patents. Focusing on them shifts the discussion away from the issue at hand, and toward a political stance that people have already heard. avar's post does the latter. Just like in a topic about whether to vote for a specific tax levy, it's inappropriate to talk about whether property taxes as a whole should be abolished.
- 11y ago
- shostack 11y agoExcept it gets really interesting down the line once we create a new intelligent life form. How would you feel if your body, consciousness, and everything you were was patented?
- hugh4 11y agoI guess I'd prefer it to a situation where anyone at all could make a clone of me on their 3D printer slash uterus. There are an awful lot of ethical and legal considerations when custom-designed intelligent organisms become possible, I'm not sure if IP is high on the list.
- logfromblammo 11y agoIf you want to copyright an organism, you had damned well better remove its ability to copy itself without your permission first. As much of the utility in modified organisms is that they do copy themselves without your help, it seems as though the patent system would be much better suited, because there the enforcement burden is to prevent a human from using the organism to accomplish a specific purpose. People sometimes forget that laws are pointless if they are not enforceable.
- aeorgnoieang 11y ago> People sometimes forget that laws are pointless if they are not enforceable. Or worse than pointless; actively harmful.
- cookiecaper 11y agoSince copyright terms often exceed 150 years, I think we're better off with patents, which last for 20 years.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y agoPatents are for inventions. For mechanisms. It's only in the last few decades that it has been otherwise.
- chc 11y agoIn seeking to patent an organism, they are treating the novel organism as an invention. Copyright doesn't protect purely functional elements, only creative ones, which is why we have the idea of patenting inventions — so patent seems like the right system in this case.
- bcabs 11y ago> the need to protect / profit off what you've developed. first mistake.